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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#211

Post by qznc »

pjmlp wrote: post #205
rwmj wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml uses C's linker model, and yet still manages to have working Modula-like modules (even with cross-module inlining). So there's an existence proof that it's possible to do it well.

Where can I learn more about it in a high level way instead of delving into source code? I am curious how it is done in a portable way across all OSes, specially crude system linkers and OSes without POSIX semantics. For example, I imagine this can be made via ELF sections, but not all OSes use ELF.

My guess: The trick is not to have "template instantiation" but "module instantiation" (aka Functors in OCaml). Now you can instantiate only once. For example, if the compiler encounters "List", it would instantiate into the "List$Foo.o" file or not if it already exists. Java works similarly, except the files have the extension "class" instead of "o".

More generally speaking: The trick must be to not generate identical instantiations multiple times. So you must have a way to check, if you already generated it. Of course, the devil is in the details (e.g. is equivalence on the syntactic level enough?).

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#212

Post by dijit »

hultner wrote: post #85
hota_mazi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to have improved these past years but beach balls used to be comically widespread on OS X. I'm not at all convinced OS X is in any better shape than Windows. And OS X certainly doesn't have anywhere near all the kick ass monitoring tools that Windows as, such as the ones shown in this article.

You do know that OS X have DTrace?

not just "it has DTrace" it has one of the best implementations/supports of DTrace in any operating system.

It's quite impressive.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#213

Post by ash »

andrepd wrote: post #193
mpweiher wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Damn, are we doing this wrong? Yes, and I mean "we" as in "this industry". I just recently talked to someone whose Swift framework(s) were compiling at roughly 16 lines per second. Spurred on by Jonathan Blow's musings on compile times for Jai[1], I started tinkering with tcc a little. It compiled a generated 200KLOC file (lots of small functions) in around 200 ms. Then there are Smalltalk and Lisp systems that are…

Are you serious? You want to make a product: a Web browser. What technology are you going to choose? The one that makes your browser fast but gives you more work, or the one that makes your browser slower but makes compilation less of a nuisance to you ? It's mind boggling that some would openly say that, hey, who cares about performance that much, these compilation times bother me, the developer. On a browser of all…

Why not fast browser and fast compilation at the same time?

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#214

Post by azeirah »

mpweiher wrote: post #184
jchw wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is a good example of a language with fast compilation times. Of course, the optimizer needs improvements, but I believe they keep managing to make it faster as they improve the output rather than slower.

Wasn't that Wirth's rule for Oberon and/or Pascal? Any optimization introduced has to have sufficient cost vs. benefit ratio that it makes the compiler faster compiling itself.

Ah yes, I remember that rule, I think it's incredibly clever. I believe he had another rule, language updates can only /strip/ features, so the core language will always get smaller and smaller.

Brilliant

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#215

Post by greggman »

staofbur wrote: post #52
anigbrowl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have almost the same background (Vic-20, if you thought programming was hard try having only 3.5k of RAM) and feel the same irritation...but I don't wonder why computers aren't faster, I wonder why operating systems and application is so utterly shit. I have a Moto X phone (not too old) and watching it slow down is almost comical. Sometimes I'll decide to close a few apps and hitting the selector button brings up s…

I think most of the shit is concentrated on a couple of notable platforms: Windows and Android. Outside of that space I've noticed less productivity hampering nightmare tools and OS features. Really I get perhaps one or two bits of stupid from Linux a year on the server-side, usually when integrating it with Windows ironically, and on the macOS/iOS front I haven't had a notable issue since I switched about a year ago…

the op was building chrome. building on osx exhibits similar issues. there are instructions in the readme on how to configure macos not to chug and lose all responsiveness when building chrome.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#216

Post by Rexxar »

twobyfour wrote: post #145
jmartinpetersen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing." [0] [0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus_%C3%A7a_change,_plus_c%2...

The common idiomatic translation is "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

It's the same meaning but the tone seems completly different to me.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#217

Post by martyvis »

For my own amusement, when ever I get a new OS build on my machine, I'd open up a task manager and watch CPU load just by wiggling the mouse a lot or maybe simply pressing page up and down. I'm pretty sure it's always pretty easy to generate 25% CPU doing very little. Another thing would be just opening a local file from within a running application and wondering why multiple seconds and hence billions of CPU cycles seems to be consumed what one expects should be doing a fairly menial task. (I am pretty sure in DOS 3.3 with Norton Commander it was quicker )

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#218

Post by girvo »

beagle3 wrote: post #183
oblio wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While what you're saying might be true, I can't help but think about Pascal units and say: "It didn't have to be this hard! We solved this problem 40 years ago!"

The heir to the Pascal/Delphi kingdom seems to be Nim[0], though it takes its syntax from Python. Compilation is impressively quick, even though it goes through C. [0] https://nim-lang.org/

Which is a language I absolutely adore, and am building a homomorphic encryption based product leveraging Hyperledger on a rather obscure 160 hardware thread POWER8 server; it can definitely work for real production tasks today, even if some parts are rough (and hell, C++ can be rough too). Parallel compilation on this machine is stupidly quick :)

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#219

Post by qznc »

mpweiher wrote: post #105
titzer wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I work for Google on Chrome. A Chrome build is truly a computational load to be reckoned with. Without the distributed build, a from-scratch build of Chrome will take at least 30 minutes on a Macbook Pro--maybe an hour(!). TBH I don't remember toughing out a full build without resorting to goma. Even on a hefty workstation, a full build is a go-for-lunch kind of interruption. It will absolutely own a…

> Damn, are we doing this wrong? Yes, and I mean "we" as in "this industry". I just recently talked to someone whose Swift framework(s) were compiling at roughly 16 lines per second. Spurred on by Jonathan Blow's musings on compile times for Jai[1], I started tinkering with tcc a little. It compiled a generated 200KLOC file (lots of small functions) in around 200 ms. Then there are Smalltalk and Lisp systems that are…

I'm not sure if the approach of Lisp and Jai (and also D) is the best one. They all have practically arbitrary code execution at compile time, so they can be arbitrarily slow to compile. In C++ template-programming is so hard that few people do it, but in those languages it is just as easy as normal code.

With mainstream languages, code generation is done by the build system which can avoid repetition. Caching generated code feels like a good idea to me. Doing it with compile time execution is (unnecessarily?) hard.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#220

Post by puzzle »

alacombe wrote: post #17

So what now ? Should/does the author wait getting some traction on Hacker News and hopefully be noticed by dev at Microsoft, or is there some way to provide Microsoft directly these data, skipping Tier-1 support ? The author seem to be working at Google, so he might get some leverage from that, but what about Random Joe ? Keep enjoying the bug "forever", I guess ?

The author also used to work at Microsoft in the performance team...
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